Digital Public Library of America

A Brief History

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is envisioned as a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. The DPLA planning initiative was launched in December 2010 with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. As the DPLA planning process continued, numerous other funders contributed, including: Arcadia Fund, Institute of Museum and Library Services, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The public launch of the DPLA took place in April, 2013, and included the DPLA's first online collaborative exhibition with Europeana, Leaving Europe: A new life in America. The DPLA is led now by Executive Director Dan Cohen and guided by a Board of Directors comprised of leading public and research librarians, technologists, intellectual property scholars, and business experts from around the country. The first DPLAfest will take place on October 24 & 25 in Boston.

CLIR and the DPLA

In 2011, CLIR’s Digital Library Federation (DLF) Program assembled one of 60 teams participating in a DPLA “beta sprint”—a call for ideas, models, prototypes, tools, and user interfaces that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wider range of broadly distributed content. The DLF Program’s beta sprint effort leveraged content from more than 1,000 cultural heritage collections described in the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project.

CLIR staff also participated in DPLA planning process through the Content & Scope Workstream and the Steering Committee. The Content & Scope Workstream identified content and articulated a collection development policy for the DPLA by confronting questions relating to the management of and access to distributed materials, research, and data curation. CLIR President Charles Henry served on the intial Steering Committee, and continues to serve on the current Advisory Committee. DLF Program Director Rachel Frick co-chaired and Program Officer Jena Winberry served as coordinator for the Content & Scope Workstream. Frick currently co-chairs and Winberry serves as a member of the Content Committee.